In Nightmares We're Alone (31 page)

I’m in my own dining room having drinks with all the dead greats.
 

Shakespeare and Chaucer. Jane Austen and C. S. Lewis. Mark Twain entertaining Truman Capote and Harper Lee, puffing away on a cigar, with Oscar Wilde behind him, people-watching. Tolstoy, Joyce Carol Oates, the Fitzgeralds, James Joyce and Marcel Proust and Faulkner and Nabokov and Dostoevsky.

That’s who
they
are. My
them
.

I take a step back and bump into Ernest Hemingway, sloshing his drink against his chest.

“Woah, watch out,” he says. He studies my face for a moment and asks, “I don’t believe I know you, do I?”

No. No, he wouldn’t. None of them would.

I turn back to the living room and it’s packed to burst. Chekhov, Melville, Dickens. Kafka. Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf.

My vision blurs and I feel dizzy. I sit next to the fireplace.

“Are you all right?” asks George Orwell.

All eyes go to me, the outsider. They all wait for me to answer, but I have no answer.

I’m the only one who’s afraid. I’m the only one who doesn’t understand why she’s here. What am I doing in a room with them? Who am I to be here?

I look around the room at all the faces, all the brilliant men and women watching me, wondering what’s wrong with me, what I’m doing here, who I think I am to crash their party.

I put my arms out at my side and give a full-body shrug. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know why I’m here, but it couldn’t be clearer that I don’t belong, that the life I wanted and the life I got were two very different lives.

My ironic little Hell. Everything I ever wanted. Hey Edna, how’s that French coming? Go strike up a conversation with Proust. Go give him your opinions on the concept of involuntary memory. Not
your
opinions. You have no opinions. Give him the opinions of all the other fellows you’ve been quoting in your mind all your life.

I look down at the floor. This is what I wanted. I couldn’t become what I wanted and I couldn’t want what I had, and here I am. Here’s the result.

This old house, packed with the world’s greats. And it could have housed one of the greats. Maybe it could have. If I’d made a solitary effort. She who stood on the shoulders of giants and saw nothing but the giants themselves.

Just before I wake up covered in sweat, standing here in what days ago I might have described as my own personal Heaven, I find myself breaking down.
Jesus Christ,
I think.
What I wouldn’t give to go home.

* * * * *

When I wake up I can feel
them
standing over my bed and watching me. I strain myself not to scream at them out of fear of losing my sanity, which, if it’s still intact in the first place, hangs by a thread.

The whole house is full of them. They surround me everywhere I go as though they want something from me.

…waiting for my senses to become sharper…

I make myself get out of bed and walk to the kitchen and drink a cup of coffee. My first cigarette of the morning I try to make myself smoke outside, but I end up sitting against the wall by the front door and ashing in the drawer of a cabinet in the Trash pile.

I toss the cigarette butt in the drawer and stand in the middle of the room with my eyes closed.

“I’m done being silly,” I hear Mom’s voice, the last words she spoke to me. “It’s just an old house.”

I jerk my eyes open and spin to look at the typewriter, still sitting there on top of the Storage pile where it’s been left.

No paper. There’s nothing in it. And it cuts my breath short to realize I actually wanted there to be something there.

Tell me something. Whoever’s there, whoever’s here. Tell me what it is I’m missing. Tell me what’s just out of reach, here in the unknown, following me everywhere I go. Tell me what all the greats saw just beyond the surface that I can’t make my eyes focus on. Tell me what Mom saw that let her go smiling, what Arthur missed. Or was it the other way around?

I know when you’ll show yourself. If I go to that door. If I walk away. If I leave this house. If it’s a choice between letting me go or stepping into the light to pull me into the dark, that’s when you’ll do it. Isn’t that what Mom and Dad and Arthur all said?

Well damn it, let’s go ahead and do it.

I unlock the front door and put a hand on the knob.

Grab me. You beasts of the Earth. You unseen wonders in the shadows of everything. If you are going to take me, do it now.

I hold my breath as I pull open the door.

I am here. Why will you not show yourself to me? I’m ready to see whatever it is I’ve always missed. Fill the emptiness that’s always been there inside. Fill it with anything. Fill it with pain and horror but show me there’s something more than nothing.

I step out of the house and shut the door behind me.

Nothing. That’s exactly what there is. All of life’s tortures are the products of our minds, and that is the greatest sadness of all.

* * * * *

I go to school. Even though class has already started, even though I’ve told them I won’t be back for at least a week, even though I know Mrs. Coughlin is in there right now teaching them some new arts and crafts project or how to do long division, I still come to school. I arrive halfway through recess and come into the playground to find a young girl lying on the ground with a broken nose and everyone else gathered around her in a circle trying to ask her how it happened.

“She didn’t even
do
anything,” the girl’s friend is saying. “We were just jumping rope and Macie came and called us a bad word and punched her. She should go to jail.”

I shake my head. I don’t even want to think about Macie. I search the crowd until I spot Martin, listening intently with everyone else and trying to learn what happened. I run to him and pull him aside.

“Martin, I need to talk to you.”

“Mrs. Harris? They said you weren’t here today.”

“I know. Martin, why did you write that sentence on my board yesterday? Tell me the truth.”

“What?”

“You didn’t write it, did you? Or did somebody tell you to? I need you to tell me.”

“I don’t know.”

“You have to know. Did you really write it? Did you write all of them, every day? All week? Do you feel like you have to? Why? Why are you writing them?”

Martin sighs and shakes his head. “I didn’t write it. Okay? Happy?”

I stop. I try to process what I already knew. I nod. “Why did you say you did?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do. Why, Martin? For attention? To make me mad at you?”

He shrugs his shoulders, timid. “Because you were yelling at everybody and I wanted you to stop. I thought everybody would like me more if I got them off the hook.”

“Be kind. For everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

I look at him for a long while and shake my head. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I yelled at everybody. I just needed to know. Do you… Do you
know
who wrote it?”

He stares at me for the longest time, studying me and shaking his head. I must be acting crazier than I realize if a ten-year-old can regard me with such a confused curiosity.

“No,” I say in answer to my own question. “No, of course. Nobody saw it. A full classroom of students and not one person saw who wrote on the board. I don’t know how that’s possible, but no one saw.”

I’m about to stand up when Martin says, “
You
wrote it.”

Whatever my heart is doing isn’t comfortable and I have to sit on the pavement.

“No I didn’t,” I say.

“When Macie was showing her doll, you wrote it on the board.”

“That didn’t happen.”

“I watched you do it. You wrote it there and then forgot about it.”

“Martin, I did
not
write those words on the board!” I scream.

Martin shakes his head at me. “Whatever, Mrs. Harris. It’s recess.”

* * * * *

It’s still recess when I go into the classroom and find it empty. I face out to the empty seats for a long time, trying to brace myself before I turn around and face the chalkboard.

It’s blank. Not a word.

“Come on, damn you,” I say out loud. “Speak to me.”

I close my eyes and count to ten. When I open them there’s still not a word on the chalkboard.

“Say something!” I shout. I ram the palm of my hand into the chalkboard.

I shut my eyes again and count. I open them.

“Goddamnit! Goddamnit, say something to me! Tell me something! Tell me any goddamn thing!”

“Edna! Are you okay?” Mrs. Coughlin is standing in the doorway with a coffee mug in her hand and horrified wrinkles on her forehead.

“Did you write something on this board?” I ask. “Last week, I mean? Last Friday when you taught the second half of the day? Did you write a quote by… by Tennyson, or… Melville! It was Melville! Did you write something of his on the board for the class?”

She shakes her head and there’s a faint, confused laugh. “No. Melville? Tennyson? It’s second grade. If I quoted a poet it would have been Seuss.”

She laughs again, but I don’t.

“Are you okay, Edna?” she asks again.

“I’m fine. I… I’m fine. I’ll go now.”

Seuss. This miserable, vicious world closing in around me, all the knowledge I thought I’d gained pounding away at my psyche and making me insane, what I wouldn’t give to go back to Seuss.

Will you kill me in my sleep?

Will you kill me while I weep?

Did you kill my mom and dad?

Are you real or am I mad?

Will you taunt me till I die?

Must you haunt me, why oh why?

Someone, someone, take my hand.

I do not, can not, understand.

* * * * *

Arthur’s medium calls me on the way out of the classroom and I stand in the hall and talk to him. He asks me if I hate him and I tell him I don’t. He tells me he’s a bad person. That he has lied many times. Maybe it’s the same thing he told Arthur that helped to lead him back to the house after he said he’d left.

“I… I’ve been suffering,” he says. “I’ve been… My body is deteriorating, or my mind is, or both. Something’s going horribly wrong with me. And… And I’ve been seeing things. Visions. And one of them… Mrs. Harris, I’ve been seeing your husband.”

I half-fall against a locker, and days ago I’d hang up. Even now, most of me says to hang up. But I listen.

“Mrs. Harris?”

“And?” I almost shout. “And? Yes, you see my husband, and…? What does he say?”

“Nothing,” he says, after a long pause. “He… I’ve just seen him. He spoke a couple sentences to me, but they were just riddles. I told him you said he was dead and he said you were a nihilist and you don’t know what dead is.”

I could believe it. If dead Arthur could speak, I could believe he’d say that. But I could also believe that, week after week, spilling his guts to this guy, Arthur gave him enough about the two of us that he could use it to manipulate me. The same way he’s made his entire career.

“I didn’t hate you when I picked up, but I think I’m beginning to,” I say coldly.

“I don’t blame you. Will you talk to me anyway?”

I tell him I’ll think about it. We hang up and I doubt the truth of his story, but on the long walk from Julie Coughlin’s classroom, past Victor Van Berkum’s office, to the parking lot, I have a little time to think about stories and truth.

All stories are half-truths.

Everything I tell you, I have chosen to tell you. You can never know why I have chosen to tell it to you. Even if I tell you why, the reason I give is something else I have chosen. What I show you of myself is calculated, even if I try not to let it be.

I have experienced the entirety of the world as I know it from behind one set of eyes, and no matter how I invite you to see from behind them, you never truly can, just as I can never see from behind yours.

In our own stories, we are, each of us, the protagonist. Every story is populated by friends and villains, mentors and proteges, lovers and traitors, philosophers and bastards, each of whom is the protagonist of his own story, and in his story we pick up the co-starring roles. Between all the stories happening at once, we play every conceivable part.

There is infinitely more to life than what any of us sees. This is the reason for all religion, philosophy, and art—a futile struggle against the limitedness of our own perspectives. We strive to see what it is impossible for us to see.

Julie Coughlin is a born again Christian. This is the truth as I know it, or at least as I have chosen to tell it to you. When she was much younger, her husband crashed his car on the way home from daycare with their two-year-old son. Both were killed. Julie attempted suicide the following day. When the attempt failed, she dedicated her life to teaching, to nurturing children. Though I have only on rare occasion spoken to Julie for more than a minute at a time, I know this.

I know it because she proselytizes. She proselytizes because each of us needs a way to deny the limitedness of our perspectives, to tell ourselves we see the whole of which we make up a fragment—that ominous thing no one will ever see. We know it is there. We do not
believe;
we
know
. And yet it is unknowable.

Victor Van Burkem is a drinker. Though he is a professional man, conscious of his image, and I doubt he has ever taken a sip during school hours, I have noticed the bottle of Wild Turkey always present in the lower left drawer of his desk. I have noted how the liquid in the bottle is slowly drained and refilled every two weeks, and sometimes when I stay late at school and leave during the night, I see him sitting alone at his desk and I know the liquid in the bottle is being drained.

I have noted how, on such nights, he takes off his wedding band and places it on the desk in front of the picture of his wife. I do not know if he loves his wife, nor do I know if she loves him. The dark suspicion I have is that one party loves the other deeply and these feelings are not returned, but I cannot say which is which.

I may be wrong. All of this comes from my limited perspective, the world as it exists from behind my jaded and cynical eyes.